The Dark Side of The Portal is the second solo exhibition of Berlin-based artist Dennis Rudolph at Lily Robert. Under a title that refers to the eponymous album of Pink Floyd, it includes a series of new photograms created live on the night of the opening. The gallery’s lower level is therefore turned into a dark room occupied by the artist at work closed to the visitors. This process is filmed and projected in real time into the gallery’s ground floor.

A cardinal point of Rudolph’s practice resides in his attraction to the notions of trial, thresholds, and failures. His work constitutes a sort of polygraph, in the sense that, under the neo-romantic cover of demanding obedience, it questions and reinvents Western civilization's heritage. After studying at the Language and Cultural Institute of Beijing, at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, as well as at the Berlin University of Arts, where he graduated in 2004, Dennis Rudolph began a practice anchored in visual arts as well as performance, with means that call upon notions of incompletion, deconstruction, and perspectivism.

If Dennis Rudolph’s work can be associated with the Romantic movement for its Dionysian (1) essence, his modus operandi is no other than post-conceptualist in its refusal of creating iconic masterpieces, along with a serial approach and process methods. He implements different topographic systems that turn a fragment into a device that dismantles the work’s narrative. A major characteristic of postmodern sensibility, according to Lyotard, consists in questioning the notions of unity, uniformity, and harmony. We here find this state of an open work that constantly gets rewritten and thereby echoes our fragmented post-modern world. The Portal is a procedural project the artist has been tackling since 2012, to create a symbolic bridge between heaven and hell that marks the border of Western civilization’s expansion. With this work, Rudolph offers a rewritten and very tangible version of official History, while distinguishing fact from interpretation. This vast enterprise becomes paramount of the political role attributed to artists today.

After sejourning in California and returning from a research trip to Beirut, the artist brings back material for a “Dark Side of the Portal” meaning the side facing the Eastern world. Working on transparent film with paint and printed material, Rudolph exposes these “positives” onto photo paper thus receiving a negative. The alchemy involved in these prints’ development process for the artist brings to mind the Arab and Oriental mythology from an orientalist point of view. The “East” is also introduced with the exhibition title in Arabic calligraphy written from the right to left suggesting a possible B-side or mirror of the “West”. “Might creative engines be reinstating emotion, which one thought had deserted the field of art to the benefit of analytical thought and the ‘critical detachment’ of dominating radical avantgardes.” This thesis advanced by Catherine Grenier meets contradiction in Rudolph’s work. In Dante’s text The Divine Comedy, this writer takes the image of a door literally and exposes its inner, abyssal geography. Dante’s moral epic describes the universe from top to bottom, filled with characters, either historical or mythological, each assigned a place in afterlife. The text is an extraordinary inventory of human evils and has inspired many artists who seek to explore the depths of human consciousness. In his Gates of Hell, Rodin does not illustrate the episodes described by the poet but engages in its reflection on the human condition - a project Rodin never managed to finish. It is this "shipwreck of hope" that Dennis Rudolph (2) represents in his work. Twentieth- century art was born under the sign of pathos and empathy, reviving the great forces of tragedy, drama, and comedy. (3) Enfant terrible of modernity, Dennis Rudolph responds to current impulses of defeatism by involving viewers in a grieving process - of the end of a civilization and of its vacuous nature.

If Dante makes explicit reference to The Aeneid and The Apocalypse of Paul, the two best-known ancient texts in the genre of travel diaries, Nicolas Bourriaud, in his book Radicant, defines contemporary artists as "semionauts" or navigators. Constantly uprooted, artists invent pathways and create signs rather than objects. Artists thus share with current globalization the ability to easily uproot yet settle and join forces "elsewhere" in a form of continuous wandering. That may be what Rudolph embodies, in the tradition of the romantic figure of the artist at work here, literally. (4)

The Dark Side of the Portal opens a door to the possible refounding of the world. The exhibition seeks, in the words of Nietzsche, to continue to "crumble the Universe."

— Agnès Violeau, January 2016

1. According to philosopher Michael Löwy, the romantic vision represents a form of "self-critical reality" that focuses on five main themes: the world’s disenchantment, its quantification, mechanization, rationalist abstraction, and dissolving social bonds.

2. The expression refers to both the real title of the painting The Sea of Ice (or The Shipwreck of Hope) by Caspar Friedrich (after the name of the ship run aground, which led to certain misunderstandings), as to the last line of Canto III in Hell: "You who enter, abandon all hope. "

3. Cf. Catherine Grenier, La Revanche des émotions, 2008, Seuil.

4. Another aspect of being a part of neo-romanticism is the artist's confinement upon his return trip, and choosing to work in an enclosed, artificial area, which calls to mind the artist’s studio. The contrast between his confinement (the threshold of private space – public space is paradoxically made visible by overruling it through the live public video recording) and use of streaming technology for artistic creation again raises the question of artists’ "place" in the public arena.